Show your support for home-based care and services.
NAHC is always advocating for home care and hospice in Washington, D.C., but elected officials want to hear directly from their voters. You, your staff, patients, and your families are the best home health care and hospice community advocates.
You are first-hand experts on the issues and opportunities impacting home-based care and services today, and your representatives need to hear from you.
Change is achieved through strength and unity of voice, and together we can make an extraordinary impact.
NAHC Advocacy Week!
April 16-17, 2024
Day One:
- Suggest doing a company zoom/teams/in-person meeting to make sure all of your staff know the impacts these cuts (from both a home health and hospice standpoint will have on them, the organization, and their patients. This meeting will create more grassroots and obtain company buy-in from all employees. This will also set the tone for the request to come. Send out the Action Alert link and ask all staff to do it at the meeting or by the end of the day.
- Consider offering drawings for those who participate—$ 25 gas cards for buy-in. Put everyone who participates in a drawing. Make it fun! The sad reality is that some people won’t understand it and won’t be bought in because they have too much going on in their lives to learn about the importance of advocacy, but you would be surprised what someone will do for a gift card, ha!
Day Two:
- Draft an Organizational Letter to Your Legislators and have each of your employees send a more personalized letter/email as an employee of your organization and address the impact it will have on their constituents. Gear this letter towards access to care issues, cuts in staff, the strain on rural patients, etc. Have your employees send this from their work email.
- Reach out to your local newspapers and TV Stations to request an op-ed and commercial/news talk about these effects on the community
Day Three:
- Draft a patient letter where patients can fill in their names and leave a comment area for personal stories, etc. Provide patients with addressed envelopes and stamp
- Have the Marketing Team request key referral sources/physicians/hospitals/etc. to do a short video on their organizational social media pages supporting home health and addressing these cuts.
- Referral partners will be affected by these cuts. Hospitals won’t be able to discharge rural and costly patients as easily or quickly as they have been due to access to care issues and fewer organizations going further to rural areas. Agencies will have to consider taking on costly wound care patients because of the cuts and the responsibility and duty of being responsible for those expensive supplies.
- Hospice agencies will be more eager and able to admit hospice patients, which could impact their cap. This isn’t a decision they would want to make, but their hands would be tied. This will affect the hospital and rehospitalizations of those more chronic patients and those hospitals and referral partners who are punished for these constant bounce-backs.
- Ask these organizations to talk about these impacts, share them on their social media accounts, and ask their employees to get involved.